I was in second or third grade when I started filling notebooks.

Both. I’m a big believer in keeping to a writing discipline, but I certainly don’t turn down inspiration when it finds me. Actually writing during the time I schedule for writing is my greatest challenge — now more than ever, what with the abundant delights and distractions of the Internet always at hand.

Sit down at the computer. Jump up. Quickly load the dishwasher. Sit down. Check Facebook. Check Flickr. Write one word. Check Facebook again. Write three words. Check the latest Read Write Poem poll. Vote. Write two words. Check Salon. Check my email. Write four emails. Begin IMing a dear friend in Minnesota about how poorly my writing time is going. Pound my head repeatedly against my desk …

See above.

I’m not blogging at this time.

I haven’t had a lot of experience with collaboration.

From Jack Gilbert’s “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”:

“How astonishing it is that language can almost mean
and frightening that it does not quite.”

It depends on the day. Today I’ll say it’s this line from a poem of mine called “Dancing in a Foreign Language”:

You speak in the arabesque of your hands
shifting into the damp hollows your mouths leave
on each other’s skin: the shape your words would make
if you were able to pronounce them.

I have two: Jack Gilbert and Jane Hirshfield. There are many, many other poets I love tremendously, but these two occupy another stratosphere entirely in my personal pantheon of poetry gods and demigods and godlets.

There are lots of important things done by different types of poetry, but much of the poetry I love best conveys a deep, resounding truth or wisdom that would be lost or diminished if the writer tried to articulate it in any other form. I also love poems that offer sheer delight with their musicality, inventiveness, strangeness, beauty.

This summer I was sitting on a riverbank, scribbling a draft of a poem. There was a strong wind. I had to fish the poem out of the river and wait for the paper to dry in the sun before I could continue writing.

I’m a loner longing for community. A misanthropic humanist, a deeply suspicious optimist, and an antisocial haunter of social networking sites. I’m just here looking for others like me, kindred spirits, like-minded souls.

Define “world.” Define “save.” Poets know better than to save the world. Don’t they? Most of the history’s greatest horrors have been committed by people trying to save the world, according to their own vision of how it should best be saved. One man’s savior is another man’s fascist, terrorist, dictator, demon. The Apocalypse has very different meanings, depending on your point of view.

I’ve been writing poems for as long as I can remember. The oldest poem I have on hand is one I wrote when I was eight.

I began to take writing poems seriously in college, when I took my first writing workshop as an adult. Going to Bennington in 1997 for my MFA gave me permission to really immerse in writing; I’m incredibly grateful for that.

I try to write a little bit every day, though not always poetry; sometimes I work on prose projects or blog posts. Over the last 18 months or so I’ve been blogging one “Torah poem” each week, a poem which arises in dialogue with that week’s portion in the weekly Jewish lectionary. Writing (and sharing) that one poem a week seems to be a good discipline for me.

Nope! Sometimes I listen to music (without words, or at least without words in any language I understand) and I’ve been known to light a stick of incense, but really nothing’s critical.

When a first draft of a poem is finished, I print it out and stash it in my “poems: 2009″ folder, which lives on my desk. A few days later I’ll return to it, read the printed version, and see what leaps out at me. Usually after a few days away from the poem, I can see what’s essential and what needs to go. Often I discard the first few lines of the poem, up to the first third, because those turn out to be the ladder which got me into the poem but don’t necessarily need to stay there. Usually I trim material away and then figure out what I want to add.

Some poems only need one or two iterations of revision. Others take much longer. The nice thing about the weekly Torah poems is that I have to post that week’s poem by Friday afternoon before Shabbat rolls around, so I have a deadline each week. Deadlines turn out to be great motivators for me.

Over the years that I’ve been blogging (I started Velveteen Rabbi in 2003), I’ve come to see the interconnections between my religious work and my poetry work more clearly. I don’t know that blogging has changed my poems, per se, but it’s changed my willingness to share those poems with the wider world even if they aren’t “perfect” yet.

I love collaboration! Most recently, back in December I had the opportunity to guest-blog at the Best American Poetry blog for a week. I decided to write a poem a day and post them to the blog, and I asked seven friends to give me one line or couplet apiece. The borrowed lines went into the daily poems. It was a great experience for me; I wound up writing seven poems which I think were far more different from one another than my poems tend to be, and I think that’s because each one had a piece of someone else at its heart.

One line? That’s tough. Maybe “We must love one another or die,” Auden, from “September 1, 1939.”

Right now, maybe the answer is, “My heart thumps want to know / don’t want to know,” from my poem “First Visit,” which is in an as-yet-unpublished manuscript called Manna.

Jane Kenyon, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mark Doty.

Sanctifies the ordinary. By which I mean: A poem can cut a new facet into something mundane, which allows that ordinary thing to refract amazing light. The light was always there; we just don’t see it, most of the time. Poems can offer us new ways of seeing.

On the back of a receipt at a dairy bar (that’s the local name for what some folks might call a fish fry) at a bright pink picnic table, waiting for my order.

I love being part of a community of people who take poetry seriously, even if we don’t always take ourselves seriously.

Absolutely. Or, at least, it can inspire us to do so, and that’s really what counts.